Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto

Reflection: My Activism

Bill Hilton
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Palo Alto, CA

My activism started tentatively, to say the least, at Oberlin College. Some of my classmates went south for voter registration drives, and to march from Selma to Montgomery. I believed then, though never checked it out, that my father would disown me if I did that. Anyway it was pretty scary for a late teen who'd never been out of Pennsylvania and Ohio.

So at Oberlin I contented myself with marching on the college President's house to protest “in loco parentis.” I thought that emotionally risky, but not physically so. That was 1963.

In 1971, I returned from army service in Vietnam and marched against the war in Golden Gate Park. I was so angry with my father and the government by then that I cannot describe it. It took me years after my father's untimely death in 1977 to work past my anger with both. I wasn’t willing to divorce myself from “the establishment” (as we called it in those days), so my activism was rather circumspect.

Coming into the UU fold in 1986 did not precipitate engagement in activism until the run-up to the Iraq War. I participated in several marches in Palo Alto and San Francisco. That gave more vent to my anger about Vietnam as well as about my country’s mistaken move into Iraq. Later this decade I worked against Prop 8.

This year I finally joined a winning cause — No on Prop 23. It was very satisfying to get rather deeply involved because having retired, I had plenty of time. Oberlin has again been involved in my activism this year. While I was President of the Oberlin Alumni Association, I became good friends with a fellow alum who is Chair of the Enviroalums — an activist group of alumni who have pushed both the college and its alumni to address the potential disaster of global climate change. And Oberlin counts among its staff one of foremost spokespersons for combating climate change, David Orr, Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Special Assistant to the President. These two individuals and the general milieu at Oberlin influenced my getting involved in the No on 23 campaign, during which I had a lot of fun and maybe did some useful work by participating with CREDO Action, the UU Legislative Ministry CA, and our congregation.

Proposition 23 pushed many of my buttons. It was anti-environment. It tried to undue something the CA legislature had actually done — a relatively rare achievement in recent years. It was deceptively, nay cynically, worded. It purported to be concerned with jobs — which regrettably many fellow citizens were pre-disposed to believe because of the high unemployment rate. The “Yes” side presented no credible evidence that AB 32, which Prop 23 sought to derail, would cause job loss; fears made evidence unnecessary. And early in the campaign, the primary backers of Prop 23 were oil companies from Texas whose interest was really to protect the higher profit margins they enjoy in their CA refineries compared with those elsewhere.

AB 32, California’s landmark global climate change law of 2006, is the only comprehensive legislation in the country attempting to address climate change; thus, it has symbolic value for other states and the federal government to address a very risky situation for the future of human beings on spaceship earth.

Victory for No on 23 is bittersweet, however, because Prop 26 passed. Talk about deception! Prop 26 deception is now in the state Constitution. It seems to define fees, such as fees imposed on polluters, as taxes and then requires a supermajority 2/3s vote to change fees or implement new ones. The supermajority requirement applies to all local governments as well as the state and thus makes revenue prediction and planning even more precarious for cities and counties than it has been in the past couple of years. It is certain to be in the courts for a long time.

That our state Constitution permits a simple majority of voters to enact a change that requires a 2/3s supermajority to enact taxes and fees even as circumstances change over time, seems fundamentally wrong. Perhaps some aspect of this issue will be my next cause.

I close by saying that my experiences with No on 8 and No on 23 have finally dissolved enough of my fears about activism and provoked me to action, and I’m ready for another good cause. I see today that I am surrounded by insurmountable opportunity. And you know what? That’s been true my whole life.

 

Reflection: Why I Work to Rid the World of Nuclear Weapons by Richard Duda